Already the most comprehensive tool on the market, Hard Disk Manager now delivers the most advanced Storage Spaces support, new UEFI-Switch and Boot Media Builder features, plus much more!

FREIBURG, Germany, December 4, 2012 – Paragon Software Group (PSG), a leader in data backup, disaster recovery, and data migration solutions, announces the release of a new major update to both Hard Disk Manager 12 Suite and Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional, ensuring the safest and most up-to-date Windows 8 user experience possible.

With the release of Windows 8 64-bit and Windows Server 2012, UEFI has become standard, delivering new options and adding flexibility to the booting process and the fine-tuning of hardware use. Paragon’s advanced UEFI support solves booting problems that may arise during migration or restoration from an old to a new hard disk due to a change in port connection. All necessary changes to Windows Boot Manager will be made, and the system will reboot without any manual intervention. To simplify the use of systems with multiple volumes, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 also includes a new UEFI-Switch feature that allows the user to define which boot entry should be used.

The Storage Spaces feature of Windows 8 is an important step to easy implementation of thin provisioning or storage resiliency, helping users to use existing hard drives and to combine them for saving videos or other large files. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 can perform all maintenance and configuration operations with volumes on Storage Spaces, be it backup, partitioning or deletion. Additionally, the release of this major update delivers a new version of Paragon Boot Media Builder, which creates a 64-Bit UEFI-compatible boot volume that can be written on a DVD, a USB flash drive or saved as an ISO-file for virtual environments.

New and updated features include:

1. Full Windows 8 support

2. Support for GPT/UEFI configurations to successfully clone, migrate, or restore a 64-bit Windows configured to the UEFI-based boot mode

4. Boot Corrector — allows the user to perform UEFI switch in order to define a bootable operating system in case of several OSs hosted on one UEFI machine

5. Storage Spaces support

6. Advanced Paragon Boot Media Builder (BMB) add-on:

BMB is now compatible with the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 8, allowing the user to build RCD based on Windows PE 4.0 BMB creates a 64-Bit UEFI-compatible boot volume that can be written on a DVD, a USB flash drive or saved as an ISO-file for virtual environments.